The Outrageous 'Starter' Homes Of 5 Billionaire Heiresses And Heirs

The sons and daughters of billionaires aren’t like the rest of us when it comes to buying a starter home.

There’s no concern about mortgages and, in fact, some of them are setting real estate records with their outlandish purchases.

Petra Ecclestone bought a $90 million London mansion.

Media-hungry Formula One heiress Petra Ecclestone may have raised eyebrows stateside with her purchase of Candy Spelling's massive L.A. manor for $85M, but that's just her second home. When in her native England, the 23-year-old Ecclestone--who has never worked for anyone but herself--beds down at a $90M London mansion purchased specifically for her by her billionaire father, Bernie.

The dignified spread in the Chelsea neighbourhood of West London once served as an insane asylum for women, but even that didn't prevent the Ecclestones from dropping an utterly insane sum on the place. Known as Sloane House, the mansion has as many as 30 rooms, with seven bedrooms, 16 bathrooms, a rare grassy backyard, and a Grade II listing.

The 10-room aerie, previously owned by former Citigroup chairman Sanford Weill, has a wrap-around terrace, four bedrooms, windowed closets, and a den.

Georgina Bloomberg has a 3-bedroom co-op on Central Park West.

Daughter of New York's second richest man--yes, that's Mayor Michael Bloomberg--Georgina Bloomberg used some of daddy's money to pick up a very grown-up apartment on Central Park West in 2010, moving from the hip downtown neighbourhood of Nolita.

Just a few blocks north of Ekaterina's record-setting penthouse, the three-bed co-op cost a comparatively paltry $4.15M, carries a monthly maintenance bill of $3,800, and, despite the address, doesn't face the park. Still, that would be a hefty asking price for the children's book co-author to carry on her own.

Libet Johnson picked up the Vanderbilt Mansion for $48 million.

The young billionaire heiresses might be making the headlines this year, but older ones have been playing the high-end real estate game for years. Libet Johnson, one of the heirs to the massive Johnson & Johnson fortune, has been a professional philanthropist and socialite for all her life, but has somehow found time to run through a litany of outrageously expensive homes.

For years, she held court over a 20,000-square-foot sky-high spread at Manhattan's Trump Tower, believed to be worth more than $65M. Eventually, she sold that place off in pieces--after all, how many buyers could afford the whole thing--and moved closer to the ground, into the $48M Vanderbilt Mansion, a landmark townhouse just off Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side.